What’s wrong with baseball? Performance-enhancing drugs are an imminent threat to destroy the game.  New revelations will continue to emerge, building to a crisis. Already suspicious and jaded fans will get more than fed up — they will be irate. There will be a revolt far worse than ’94.  The integrity of the game will collapse, along with its superstars, its wannabees, and any future fiscal solvency of the league.  Players and owners must adopt an open policy of transparency and a take a hard line, hoping that the fans will trust their good faith efforts. But will it happen?

Perhaps what baseball needs is an amnesty program.  Help the players to get off the drugs now, coerce them to stop taking steroids, establish regular, and rigorous testing, and advise the player’s association that the careers of all players, their big money contracts, and the future of the game depend on it. Non-drug-using players must coerce steroid users to stop. Repeat drug offenders must be banned permanently from the game. Zero tolerance for a repeat offender. One year suspensions for first timers. Without pay.

Make clear to the owners that the game will not survive a drug scandal without massive financial failures across the board, a permanent migration of fans, and revelations of their own indirect, if not direct complicity in allowing drugs to circulate.

Problem: players will still use drugs under the “new policy” because it means more money. Let’s face it. Joe major leaguer knows he’s not Barry or Vlad, so he’s going to use steroids or supplements to help him hit 20 homers, or hit the ball harder, or for a slightly better average, or maybe run faster or stay bulked up for 160 games.  Then he gets his big paycheck. He’s set for life.  That is the thinking of Joe average player. It’s only a couple years on the drugs. Everyone around me is doing it. If I’m not on the drugs, I make less money, I lose my starting job to someone better — perhaps someone on the drugs, and if I go on the drugs in my free agency year, I win the financial jackpot.

Players aren’t dumb, they see guys doing it and getting away with it. They’ve gotten to the bigs, and now they can live a dream.  Owners are afraid of scandal, and players of losing money, and corrupting their stats and personal reputations. No one will admit to anything right now.  Only when the writing is clearly on the wall will both sides rush to adopt a wiser policy. But I’m a skeptic there too, because the writing IS ALREADY ON THE WALL, and we’ve only got a theater of the absurd as far as a drug policy is concerned. Systems that are broken usually only get fixed after grievous loss and devastation.  As long as no one has grounds to demand a change, or fear an imminent threat, it won’t change. This is the pattern for most crises. It takes a brave group willing to sacrifice something in order to avoid calamity.

Best example of this principle: after years of repeated pleas and federal studies, nobody supported the investment of a few measly dollars for bulletproof cockpit doors and baggage screening. Obvious and easy solutions. Why? It costs money. The worst idiocy that practices the name common wisdom is the phrase, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” That airline safety was clearly broken didn’t seem to bother airlines who worry constantly about the bottom line in a shaky industry, nor Republicans who see Government regulation as inherently bad, and the subsidizing of an industry so important to our economy and public safety somehow ideologically impossible to contemplate (or impossible, perhaps, only to their own special interest money). Thus, the absence of hijackings or bombings in America was equivalent to having no problem. Thanks to these men of vision, our nation suffered multiple catastrophes on 9/11.

I use this only as an analogy. Obviously, our present state of war, and our losses on that tragic day — particularly heartfelt for me, as I live in Washington, and spent my first 25 years in New York, and know/knew many who have suffered — are grave and demand the utmost solemnity, and the most urgent response; but the attacks on 9/11 are a classic case of not being willing to spend the money — to make the sacrifice — to insure against a far greater human, economic and social calamity. In baseball we also know that there is a problem that presents a clear and present danger to the game’s survival, so why not just come out and admit it, so that we can avoid the shipwreck of our beloved game? Why not avoid the problem while we still can? Declare amnesty. Tell players to get off the drugs for next season. Regular testing will begin. This way, everybody wins, and baseball’s dirty little secret will be revealed in the dark corners of tell-all books and Oprah-shows long after it has ceased to be an epidemic.

The drug policy approved last week by MLB is absurd. But so is all of MLB.   Earlier this season I told friends and readers of mine on this site, that it didn’t matter to me this year whether the Yankees win or lose to the Marlins, or win or lose to Boston, or even make the second round of the playoffs, because no matter what, it’s lose-lose for old time Yankee fans. We have nothing to get excited about when our team has twice the payroll of any other team, and is only expected not to lose. Well, MLB fans should feel about MLB exactly what I feel about the Yankees. It doesn’t matter really.  You want to see good baseball? Yes. But right now, it’s lose-lose. If your team wins, maybe you still lose, the game loses — and eventually, the players and owners do too. Black Sox? How about Black League? If the stats and players are partially drug enhanced, why care about them? Why care, if half the players are legal and half are illegal?

Answer: The only reason I have left to care is that my beautiful, 5-year old son discovered baseball this Fall.  Every day he would pretend to be Bernie Williams (my favorite player) chasing a fly ball or hitting a home run.  We watched the series together, and the playoffs and he would run about the room imitating his favorite players. He was excited when the Yankees made the post season (not knowing it was mostly a foregone conclusion), and was happy when they won some post-season games. He rooted for Bernie to get a hit; he asked when he was coming up during every single inning; he asked every morning who had won the previous night when the game went past his bedtime.  He didn’t see them lose game 6, but I told him it was ok — they win a lot, and they would have another chance next year.  He wasn’t sad; in fact, he was happy about that. Optimism! Wait 'til next year! He even said that next year Jason Giambi would be healthy again and hit a lot of home runs. He likes Giambi too. I hope Giambi isn’t a steroid druggie, because it will make a lot of little boys and girls very sad if he were. But if he is, I won’t tell him, and I hope that things all come out in the open this year, quickly, so they can change the system before he’s old enough to understand — or better yet, to ever know.